BODYING WORDS / WORDING BODIES – A POLYPHONIC EXPLORATION
a proposal for Resonance – SAR Conference, (Porto, 2025) [best engaged with headphones]
by WITHING – Litó Walkey, Ines Marita Schärer, Sabina Holzer, Laressa Dickey, Emma Cocker, Delphine Chapuis Schmitz
Abstract for the conference program
Initiated in 2023, WITHING is an ongoing, durational collaboration involving an international group of six women artists, for exploring the intra-action of bodying and languaging through shared practice.
Testing the possibilities for a bodily becoming of language / words we ask: How does languaging affect bodying? How does bodying affect languaging?
Since 2023, we have been creating shared conditions and situations for our mutual exploration of body/languaging. A first stage unfolded between January and June 2024 through a rhythm of rotation based on a bi-monthly cycle. For each bi-monthly iteration, a pairing (two of us working together) devised a score, /proposal, /invitation, or /focus and shared it with the others in an online meeting. Each of us then tested, enacted, activated, the proposal offline for 1 month. We subsequently reconnected online for sharing materials, /findings, /discoveries, and /reflections from our individual process of responding to the common proposal.
While the process draws on uncertainty and trust, the iterative approach creates conditions for the share-ability and transfer-ability of our explorations.
We experience(d) this as a practice of minor gestures towards an aesthetics of co-existence. Significantly, we engage the scores in our daily lives and occupations, inserting poetic lines of flight that enhance awareness of our bodies, our surroundings and thought processes. The leaking body-minds and seeping language-matters spread through durational spirals while embracing vulnerability and porosity.
As we are moving together-apart into a community of multiple resonances, the heterogenity which emerges breathes a mutual responsiveness and leaves resonating space for the specific backgrounds and circumstances that each of us is working & living in.
For the SAR Conference in Porto, we intend to activate further resonances of this process with a transversal navigation through our archive of research practice.
1. A performative reading-across through our archive of research practice. Similar to our compositional process with the above audio files, the collective reading will be based on a new score devised to activate specific resonances with WITHING and the situation of the conference.
2. A sharing of selected examples of scores (including their somatic body based attunement) and emergent material.
Dear reviewer!
* Central to this exposition-proposal is an experimental audio-piece which we hope gives a flavour/glimpse of how we envisage our multiple voices resonating as a live event within the SAR conference.
* We invite you to listen to resonances from WITHING, an artistic research project exploring the mutual interaction of bodying and languaging.
* These audio tracks are readings-across - a transversal navigation through our archive of research practice. The audio tracks were composed in response to a score that invited each of us to sift lightly through an accumulation of scores and materials that we have generated over the last year, whilst reflecting the 'call' on Resonance.
* You can compose your own listening: let all tracks play together; pause and play individual tracks; move tracks forward and back.
*As you listen to our six voices, you might also listen to your own breathing/bodying.
1. We will share and discursively "personal" insights on the affectional resonances of our practicing together, concerning the development of the scores in pairs and the activation of them as part of our daily life.
2. The introduction and sharing of some scores, including a somatic body based tuning, and some of the material which was created through them.
3. A performative, experimental, transversal reading cutting through all elements of this practice of overlapping fields: The 'methodical' related to artistic and activists practices. The 'personal' related to the quality of encounters with our daily circumstances through artistic research e.q. shifts of awareness, the potential speculative notion of a community to come, the cross-fertilization of different expertises. The 'poetic'in resonance with the resonate the environmental, ecological and social political frames of our situations.
It will unfold through an improvisational reading/reflection dedicated to the following questions:
How are we affected by the shared practice and the sharing of practice? How to elicit and disseminate affectional resonances?
As we did for the above presentation of the audio files
the collective reading in Porto will be based on a new score written to activate further resonances in the situation of the conference.
The new score is intended to explore multiplicity in singular voices, to elicit echoes among differences.
It confronts the audience with the following questions: How to listen and where to find resonances in a proliferation of voices? how to navigate potential overflow?
For more on the collaboration WITHING please engage with our work-in-progress exposition for our research project HERE.
Contextual background
WITHING emerged through attending to the vibrations of resonance between six artistic researchers who encountered one another’s practice in the context of Convocation II, a gathering of language-based artistic research, Vienna, October 2023. Whilst drawing on a wider milieu of performative/performance writing (Hall, 2007; Allsop, 1999; Pollock, 1998); art-writing (Fusco et al, 2011, Lomax, 2009), site-writing/situated writing (Rendell, 2011), creative-critical contexts (Hilevaara and Orley, 2018) as well as philosophical reflections on the relation of language/bodies (Di Paolo, Cuffari, De Jaegher, 2018) the term language-based artistic (Cocker, Daus, Séraphin, 2019) research describes an emergent genre or field of artistic research proposed for describing approaches to artistic research that work-with language as their material.
See the Society of Artistic Research Special Interest Group for Language-based Artistic Research here
WITHING is an emergent ‘thematic node’ within this wider network of language-based artistic research for specifically exploring embodied forms of languaging. Certainly, there are other examples of embodied language-based research practices operating at the interstice of bodying and languaging. For example, Writing Choreography: Textualities of and beyond Dance (London and New York: Routledge, 2024), (eds.) Leena Rouhiainen, Kirsi Heimonen, Rebecca Hilton, and Chrysa Parkinson explores the use of writing, text and language in choreographic processes, providing insights on how “performance can be transcribed into writing, how practices of writing choreograph and how choreography can be a process of writing with”. Vida L. Midgelow explores the “interplay between writing and improvisational dancing to describe a methodology for an embodied, sensual and experiential mode of writing/dancing in which the boundaries between these two disciplines are blurred”, in Sensualities: Experiencing/Dancing/Writing. New Writing 10, 2012, pp. 3–17. Jasmine B. Ulmer asks: “(W)hat if writing danced? What if words embodied movement? How might writing be inscribed as a material, kinaesthetic, visual process?”, in Embodied writing: choreographic composition as methodology.Research in Dance Education, 16(1), 2015, pp.33–50.
More broadly, cultural theorist and political philosopher Erin Manning’s wider oeuvre might be conceived to operate at the interstices of movement, thought and language. See for example, Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of Experience. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. However, within WITHING we attempt to evolve an original approach, through bringing into touch the practices of six researchers who work with language in different context including chorography, performance, bodywork, visual arts.
Bibliography
Allsop, R. (1999). Performance writing. PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, (61), 76-80.
Di Paolo, Ezequiel A., Elena Clare Cuffari, and Hanne De Jaegher. 2018. Linguistic Bodies: The Continuity between Life and Language. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: The MIT Press.
Fusco, M., Newman, Lomax. Y., & M., Rifkin, A. (2011). 11 statements around art writing. Frieze Magazine (October).
Hall, J. (2007). 13 ways of talking about performance writing. Plymouth College of Art Press.
Katja Hilevaara, Emily Orley (eds.) The Creative CriticWriting as/about Practice, (Routledge, 2018)
Yve Lomax, Passionate Being: Language, Singularity and Perseverance, (I.B. Tauris, 2009)
Manning, Erin, and Brian Massumi. 2014. Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of Experience. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.
Midgelow, Vida L. 2012. Sensualities: Experiencing/Dancing/Writing. New Writing 10: 3–17.
Oliveros, Pauline. 2005. Deep Listening: A Composers’ Sound Practice. New York and Lincoln: Deep Listening Publications.
Pollock, D. (1998). Performing writing. In Phelan, P. The ends of performance, (pp. 73 – 103). New York University Press.
Rendell, J. (2011). Site writing: The architecture of art criticism. I. B. Tauris.
Rouhiainen, Leena, Kirsi Heimonen, Rebecca Hilton, and Chrysa Parkinson, eds. 2024. Writing Choreography: Textualities of and beyond Dance. London and New York: Routledge.
Ulmer, Jasmine B. 2015. Embodied Writing: Choreographic Composition as Methodology. Research in Dance Education 16: 33–50.
Biographies
Emma Cocker (UK) is a writer-artist whose research attends to the embodied dimension of artistic process through a nexus of experimental, performative and collaborative language-based approaches (including reading and conversation). Her writing is published in Reading/Feeling, 2013; On Not Knowing: How Artists Think, 2013; The Creative Critic: Writing as/about Practice, 2018; Writing Choreography: Extending the Conventions of Dance, 2023, and the solo collections, The Yes of the No, 2016, and forthcoming How Do You Do?, 2024. She is an Associate Professor in Fine Art, Nottingham Trent University, UK. https://not-yet-there.blogspot.com/
Delphine Chapuis Schmitz (F/CH) works as an artist-researcher, as an artist-writer, as a writer-teacher, as a teacher-translator. Her field of research revolves around embedded and embodied practices of making sense, the po(ï)ethical potentials of language-s, and the exploration of meaningful relationalities in sensory entanglements. The development of a relational and performative practice of writing is at the core of her situated practice, which involves collaborative constellations of various kinds and making-thinking from a transversal perspective. www.dchapuis-schmitz.com
Laressa Dickey (US/SE) is a dance artist, writer, and bodyworker based in Stockholm whose recent projects explore the politics of care, the effects of state violence on the human body, and space junk. She’s the author of four poetry books including Syncopations and Twang. Together with sound artist Andrea Steves, she published Radio Graveyard Orbit, a speculative book about space junk. A longtime student of somatic practice and research, she researches the dancer's use of language and the writer's use to/for dance, and her artistic research has been supported by the Kone Foundation. She’s a member of the performative collaboration MISLEADING SUBJECTS and teaches occasionally at Stockholm University of the Arts. http://www.laressadickey.com/site/
Sabina Holzer is a body-based artist working in the field of expanded choreography and creates performances, dances, & texts in collaborative ways. She explores languages embedded in bodies and in the geo-historically located and informed memories & futures. Her investigations unfold in transdisciplinary performances and interventions in theaters, museums & site-specific events, such as in 2024: Publication at Varamo Press (B) in the edition of “gestures”; texts in the installation “testing grounds” in collaboration with Katrin Hornek at Secession Vienna; the choreographic assemblage “which dances – or how to imagine a future beyond extraction” at the museum for ethnology Vienna. www.cattravelsnotalone.at
Ines Marita Schärer (CH) works across poetry, performance, installation, sound art and experimental music. She is concerned with the precarities and vulnerabilities of diverse human and more-than-human beings within predominant power structures and explores voice and words as a means of establishing relationality and re-imagining their conditions and environments. Her practice is informed by the given context, permeable for various forms of knowledge, nourished and driven by thinkers, co-thinkers, collaborators and allies. https://www.inesmarita.ch/
Litó Walkey (GR/CAN) is a Berlin-based artist whose work operates collaboratively through writing and choreography. Her performance and publishing projects engage with how collective structures of (re-) writing and reading (-across) enable affective circulations that energize sense (and self) drifting. She performed and taught internationally with Chicago-based performance group Goat Island and held a long-standing teaching position at HZT (Inter-University Center for Dance) Berlin. She is a PhD candidate in Performance Practices at Gothenburg University. https://litowalkey.org/